In Barbara Tomash’s beautifully latticed
prose poem series,
Flying in Water, the
reader
is treated to the inner workings of a writer
thinking about what it means to be a woman
in language. One is reminded of
Virginia Woolf’s The Waves,
in which the dazzling
thoughts of fictive
narrators push language closer to truth. The “she” of Tomash’s suite of
poems
is alert to all the clarity of living and its complex shadows. These
poems are
gem-like,
using “her voice’s cool sleeve,” “the perfect tool to hammer white
open.” And in all of the poems
there is also the weight of eternity, of worlds
continuing after this particular voice has ended.
Maxine Chernoff
This extended and arresting interior portrait
moves from
the world to self-awareness to
language-awareness with liquid ease: “the
drawing of a leaf to look like a leaf // She is drawn to
abstraction. She makes
her mark. It is shaped like a leaf that looks like the face of an owl.
If
language were an arrow and the material world the target, she would
never hit.
She takes aim at
the leaf.” With her sequence of meditative prose vignettes,
Barbara Tomash takes aim and makes
her mark. Flying in Water is
wonderful
poetry. Carol
Snow
Flying in
Water is an exemplary book. Here, there is no firm
line of demarcation between
language and consciousness, or between either and
“the facts of life” that elude both. This
book is an act of attention to
writing, very much like Harry Mathews’s 20 Lines a Day or George
Albon’s Brief
Capital of Disturbances. Each piece remains entirely within its
moment and
occasion, and precisely for that reason, the pieces make a stunning
whole—the
autobiography of a
consciousness. George Oppen’s words appear in these poems,
as does his attention to words, to
things, to life. “If she didn’t have words,
what did she have?” “Her limit begins—ringing her.”
Edward Smallfield